Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


From dump to park

Once a Wasteland: From Toxic Dump to National Park by Diane Muldrow and Amy Jindra Hodgson

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Starting off almost poetically, Once a Wasteland: From Toxic Dump to National Park moves into the facts quickly. Everything is laid out in simple, but not simplistic terms. The overall tone is good, it allows you to access a piece of history and the extras allow the book to grow with the reader. However, “points” are lost due to the fact environmental stories are not new, it was not necessarily told in a new manner and I had questions that were not answered, such as […]

Shine your light

The Lonely Lighthouse: The Story of Little Sable Point Lighthouse by Stephanie Owen

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Picture books have become one of my favorite reading choices. I like the details and yet they can (sometimes) be no more than 40-50 pages. I get the satisfaction of reading and finishing a book usually in one sitting. And I also might learn something new if it is a historical or factual book. And The Lonely Lighthouse: The Story of Little Sable Point Lighthouse by Stephanie Owen covers all the bases. Due in mid April 2026 (read via an online reader copy), this is […]

All Roads Lead to the Oedipus Complex

The Fifty-Minute Hour by Robert Lindner

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CBR17 Bingo: Red – Behold, the cover. Robert Lindner, a prominent psychoanalyst during the 1940s, relates five unusual cases he has worked on – a murderer, a Communist, a bulimic, a Fascist, and a physicist who believed he was living a parallel life as overlord of a distant star system. I’m not sure where I heard of this book – most likely through the case of “Kirk Allen,” whose story of science fiction delusion is related in the final chapter of the book. While it […]

“Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

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CBR17 Bingo: Review – I first came across Caitlin Doughty and her books through numerous reviewers on Goodreads. Caitlin Doughty had been long fascinated with death, but when she started working at a crematory, she soon found herself more interested in the question of why death in America has become so distant from the general public. I am maybe not the right audience for Doughty’s message about the loss of intimacy and ritual in the American way of death. I am a Hindu, and we […]

What have we learned in the past 80 years? (from publisher description)

Barbed Wire Between Us by Mia Wenjen

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Barbed Wire Between Us by Mia Wenjen and illustrated by Violeta Encarnación was a WOW book. It was not necessarily the story itself (though that is pretty wild) it was the way it was formatted that really made it work for me. It is a fantastic circular story that shows how history can repeat. But not only that, the text is repeated. We start with a young girl who is behind a fence in the 1940s. How she gets there, the thoughts and feelings she […]

Dispatches from the Frontier

Little Pasture on the Prairie by Eliza Blue

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CBR17 Bingo: Work – In this book, the author discusses her life and work on her family ranch, where she is a shepherdess, and all the highs and lows of that lifestyle. Author, songwriter, and shepherdess Eliza Blue invites us into her life on her family ranch in South Dakota as told in the highlights from a decade of newspaper columns. I’ve always lived in places that are hilly or places that are green or places that are both hilly and green. I think if […]



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